British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to air a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the very considerable amounts of credibility that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the presenter's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are determined."
